Warm Homes Fund Programme Evaluation: Abridged interim report

The Evaluation Consortium has been working together on evaluating the impacts of the Warm Homes Fund (WHF) over the winter of 2019-2020 and has heard first-hand of the very significant and positive effects that the funding has had on the lives of many families and households. This includes considerable
improvements to quality of life in the home, with some households able to use their whole home rather than a single room for the first time in years. For others there have been marked improvements in their health as a result of having a warmer home with less dampness, which was often reported to have had
positive knock-on effects for their mental health and wellbeing. We have also heard from households who, as a result of a WHF intervention, have been able to afford their heating much more comfortably and without making painful trade-offs between energy and food budgeting, or doing so less frequently. We
have also been in touch with project delivery teams and heard from a majority that feel that the scheme is effectively targeting the most vulnerable households, that it has sparked new partnership working and that delivery has been effective.

Alongside these positive findings, we have also listened to householders and project delivery teams about what could be improved and how the WHF Team could learn from some of the challenges identified, to enhance the scheme in the future. These are relayed in this report so that the WHF Team can learn-as we-go about what the Evaluation Consortium is finding.

This report provides a detailed and balanced account of the research and findings to date, but it must be accompanied by the caveat that it is, of course, an interim report of our early findings. We are in the middle of our first of three waves of evaluation fieldwork, the second and third of which will take place in
2021 and 2022 respectively. The findings presented here must therefore be taken as provisional and will be developed further and made more robust as the evaluation proceeds in the coming months and years.

Nevertheless, this report constitutes a comprehensive summary of the evaluation work undertaken thus far and we look forward to your engagement with it.